After storm of bullets, charges disappear — but questions linger

Fourteen months ago, when cops shot and injured a man in a crowded shopping center, the story was front-page news and was the obsession of every TV newscast in town.

The general story line was that Rogelio Cortes had tried to "ram" police officers. So they shot him — and, boy, did he have it coming!

Only it turns out, he didn't.

State investigators ultimately determined that Cortes wasn't trying to ram anyone. His car was pushed from behind … by a cop car.

Soon, the six charges Cortes was facing — including attempted murder of a law-enforcement officer — started to disappear.

Finally, two weeks ago — on a holiday week when no one was paying attention — the state dropped the last remaining charge against Cortes.

He is now accused of no wrongdoing in connection with the shooting that topped the news that day.

Yet there wasn't a soul around to report it — much less care.

It all started Nov. 21, 2010, in a Target parking lot packed with Christmas shoppers.

The Orlando Police Department was running an operation to catch credit-card thieves — convened by a sergeant whose husband had been a victim.

Officers spotted Cortes' car in the parking lot near Orlando Fashion Square and thought it was involved in the thefts. So they surrounded it.

The cops claimed Cortes then began driving toward the officers. So they opened fire, hitting him five times in his stomach and arm.

According to everything TV viewers and newspaper readers saw, this was a bad guy getting his due.

"When somebody is ramming into a car, that's deadly force," OPD spokeswoman Lt. Barbara Jones said at the time.

Said Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent Danny Banks: "If you are going to attack a police officer, you can expect to get shot."

Except Banks' own FDLE later determined that wasn't what happened.

The 22-page report said Cortes never gunned his car — that a police car pushed him from behind.

It said statements by officers who claimed Cortes "floored the accelerator" and made his tires "squeal and spin" were contradicted by video and forensic evidence.

The report was issued in March of last year. Some of the charges against Cortes were dropped soon afterward.

Two weeks ago, on Dec. 28, the last one disappeared as well.

Not a single media outlet reported it.

Randy Means, a spokesman for State Attorney Lawson Lamar, said his office viewed the video evidence over and over — and knew the charges needed to be dropped.

"We agree with FDLE that the video is inconsistent with what the cops think they saw," Means said. "You could clearly see the car was being shoved."

No one, certainly including me, is suggesting Cortes is an angel.

He has charges in his past. And by most counts, he was at least connected to the guys that the police believed were involved in a crime. My mother used to say that, if you hang around with bad people, bad things are gonna happen to you.

But there's accessory to a crime — for which he wasn't charged, by the way — and there's getting shot five times and accused of trying to kill a cop when you didn't.

Means said that his office determined the shooting was justified because the officers who fired only knew a car was coming at them.

I get that part — and that these are split-second decisions.

If a car were coming toward me, you bet I'd do something about it. (Though there's an entirely different debate about shooting at moving vehicles. Many departments ban it altogether, urging officers to instead get out of the way because bullets often ricochet off cars, hitting unintended objects — a dangerous prospect in places such as a crowded shopping center.)

Still, there are questions no one has answered — including why multiple officers said they witnessed Cortes doing things that state investigators say he never did.

Also, there are questions about the way this operation was convened in the first place — not by unbiased officers, but by a sergeant trying hunt down someone she believed had victimized her husband. Other departments have policies prohibiting such a thing.

OPD has said very little about the case, last saying that its internal-affairs division was still reviewing the case. OPD would say nothing about it for this column.

So those involved have offered little in the way of answers.

And most of the media — which trumpeted the original story and accusations — haven't been asking the questions.